Friday, October 3, 2025

In Memoriam T.H.

Years ago my centaur’s random course through life crossed the path of a great poet. I was invited by friends from Cambridge days – the poet’s daughter & son-in-law – to a reading in London, and went along, vaguely imagining a brief, small event in a cramped bookshop. Instead a figure walked sideways into the limelight of the National Theatre with a modest, self-deprecating smile and proceeded to turn the cavernous space of the Lyttleton auditorium into an intimate nook in which we joined him on a voyage of discovery, understanding, memory and passion.  Later on, in the bar, he was great company - & when I mentioned to my friend that I found her dad to be dazzlingly stimulating and engaging but clearly not a man to tolerate any kind of shit, she said that I’d got him about right.  Learning that in his study at home in Newcastle he had a small gallery of portraits of poets that he admired, a few days later I sent him a photograph I’d taken years earlier in Italy of the death mask of Dante Alighieri. Grainy, grey and with the shallowest of focus on facial features, it’s one of the very few images I’m satisfied to have captured. The Italian looks out from blurred death with lidless eyes, drawn and exhausted by the malaria that probably killed him, transmitting to us the pain suffered and the wisdom grasped during a journey through and out of hell.  At our next meeting the poet was kind enough to thank me for the gift.  This was at a meal after a performance of ‘The Trackers Of Oxyrhynchus’, a verse-drama based on a long-lost Sophoclean satyr play, in which he’d mixed classical scholarship, Victorian colonialism, Greek myth and notions of high and low culture into a titanic parable of the uses and dangers of art, class, truth and power.  (My abiding memory of that meal is actually a bawdily low conversation with the costume designer who had given each of the masked and clog-dancing satyrs of Sophocles’ chorus personality by creating wildly individual designs for the alarmingly prominent prosthetic penises they sported). 

And some time later, the poet sent me a gift in return – a signed and dedicated copy of some just-published poems about the Gulf War of 1991.  The cover photograph was an image straight out of hell – the burnt-to-bits head of an Iraqi soldier killed by American fire during his retreat from Kuwait.  (The picture is well-known in the UK, but never seen in the USA according to American friends).  In ‘A Cold Coming’, the poet imagines meeting the dead Iraqi, being upbraided by him for shirking the poet’s responsibility to tell the truth, and then going on to hear his story and that of the three American soldiers who killed him.  It’s a chilling, terrifying tale of an individual life snuffed out by forces utterly beyond its control.  And it takes as its departure not just Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’ – to which it was compared at the time – but Dante’s incontro with Virgil at the gate of hell, and then reaches further down to Homer’s account of the chthonic world where you encounter the spirits of the unappeasable dead, and if you’re lucky or know the right words, you might just placate them for as long as it takes you to speak.  

And this poem was published on the news pages – not the culture section or entertainment supplement, please note  – of a national newspaper.  It’s difficult now to imagine, in our world of enshittified social media, that a poet can command that size of readership and speak with that sort of moral seriousness in a form that’s accessible and in language that scintillates with intellect, humanity, erudition and compassion, via such a channel (The Guardian, as it happens). But Tony Harrison did so, and gave us strength and understanding in the face of evil.   

But we live in diminished times, and a time diminished still further by his passing.  Where now the scholarship, the wit, the intelligence, the compassion, the bursting-with-relish-and-energy language, the profound learning (much Latin and more Greek), the wisdom, the utter commitment to telling the truth about our condition?

I weep for Tony Harrison - he is dead. His words shine back to us across the void and the gathering years, and will illuminate every one of our tomorrows.

 


In Memoriam T.H.

Years ago my centaur’s random course through life crossed the path of a great poet. I was invited by friends from Cambridge days – the poet’...